Stoicism Quotes

“Patience is the antidote to the restless poison of the Ego. Without it we all become ego-maniacal bulls in china shops, destroying our future happiness as we blindly rush in where angels fear to tread. In these out-of-control moments, we bulldoze through the best possible outcomes for our lives, only to return to the scene of the crime later to cry over spilt milk.”
― Anthon St. Maarten, Divine Living: The Essential Guide To Your True Destiny

“Confronting the worst-case scenario saps it of much of its anxiety-inducing power. Happiness reached via positive thinking can be fleeting and brittle, negative visualization generates a vastly more dependable calm.”
― Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

“What fortune has made yours is not your own.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“Philosophy calls for simple living, not for doing penance, and the simple way of life need not be a crude one.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what is in Fortune's control and abandoning what lies in yours.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It

“And here lies the essential between Stoicism and the modern-day 'cult of optimism.' For the Stoics, the ideal state of mind was tranquility, not the excitable cheer that positive thinkers usually seem to mean when they use the word, 'happiness.' And tranquility was to be achieved not by strenuously chasing after enjoyable experiences, but by cultivating a kind of calm indifference towards one's circumstances.”
― Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

“It is a ridiculous thing for a man not to fly from his own badness, which is indeed possible, but to fly from other men's badness, which is impossible.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“There was no sign of Plato, and I was told later that he had gone to live in his Republic, where he was cheerfully submitting to his own Laws. [...] None of the Stoics were present. Rumour had it that they were still clambering up the steep hill of Virtue [...]. As for the Sceptics, it appeared that they were extremely anxious to get there, but still could not quite make up their minds whether or not the island really existed.”
― Lucian of Samosata, Satirical Sketches

“When you run up against someone else’s shamelessness, ask yourself this: Is a world without shamelessness possible?

No. Then don’t ask the impossible. There have to be shameless people in the world. This is one of them. The same for someone vicious or untrustworthy, or with any other defect. Remembering that the whole world class has to exist will make you more tolerant of its members.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“There is, I assure you, a medical art for the soul. It is philosophy, whose aid need not be sought, as in bodily diseases, from outside ourselves. We must endeavor with all our resources and all our strength to become capable of doctoring ourselves.”
― Cicero

“I must fling myself down and writhe; I must strive with every piece of force I possess; I bruise and batter myself against the floor, the walls; I strain and sob and exhaust myself, and begin again, and exhaust myself again; but do I feel pain? Never. How can I feel pain? There is no place for it.”
― Harry Houdini

“If you apply yourself to study you will avoid all boredom with life, you will not long for night because you are sick of daylight, you will be neither a burden to yourself nor useless to others, you will attract many to become your friends and the finest people will flock about you.”
― Seneca

“Sometimes in life we must fight not only without fear, but also without hope.”
― Alessandro Pertini

“If all emotions are common coin, then what is unique to the good man?

To welcome with affection what is sent by fate. Not to stain or disturb the spirit within him with a mess of false beliefs. Instead, to preserve it faithfully, by calmly obeying God – saying nothing untrue, doing nothing unjust. And if the others don’t acknowledge it – this life lived in simplicity, humility, cheerfulness – he doesn’t resent them for it, and isn’t deterred from following the road where it leads: to the end of life. An end to be approached in purity, in serenity, in acceptance, in peaceful unity with what must be.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“It is a great man that can treat his earthenware as if it was silver, and a man who treats his silver as if it was earthenware is no less great.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“And here lies the essential difference between Stoicism and the modern-day 'cult of optimism.' For the Stoics, the ideal state of mind was tranquility, not the excitable cheer that positive thinkers usually seem to mean when they use the word, 'happiness.' And tranquility was to be achieved not by strenuously chasing after enjoyable experiences, but by cultivating a kind of calm indifference towards one's circumstances.”
― Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

“The boon that could be given can be withdrawn.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

“So the life of a philosopher extends widely: he is not confined by the same boundary as are others. He alone is free from the laws that limit the human race, and all ages serve him as though he were a god.”
― Seneca

“She (the First Lady, entering the room with her gravely wounded husband) would admit fear but not despair.”
― Candice Millard, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

“He is the kind of person I should expect to rescue one from a mad dog at any risk but then insist on a stoical indifference to the fright afterward." Jefferson Davis's future wife describing him at first meeting.”
― Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Vol. 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville

“Indeed this gentleman's stoicism was of that not uncommon kind, which enables a man to bear with exemplary fortitude the afflictions of his friends, but renders him, by way of counterpoise, rather selfish and sensitive in respect of any that happen to befall himself.”
― Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge

“He liked the English and their peculiarities. He liked their stoicism under pressure; on the wall in his factory he kept a copy of a war poster emblazoned with the Crown of King George and underneath the words “Keep Calm and Carry On.”
― Natasha Solomons, Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English

“No malgastes lo que te queda de vida en conjeturar sobre los demás, a no ser que busques el bien común; pues si te dedicas a imaginar qué hace la gente, por qué, qué dice, que piensa, qué trama, y cosas parecidas, dejarás de observar tu propia conciencia interior.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditaciones

“The wife of a junior officer cooped up in a horrible canvas partition in steerage for five months wrote:
"I had enjoyed much peace there in the absence of every comfort, even of such as are now enjoyed in jail. I used to say that there were four privations in my situation - fire, water, earth and air. No fire to warm oneself on the coldest day, no water to drink but what was tainted, no earth to set the foot on, and scarcely any air to breathe. Yet, with all these miserable circumstances, we spent many a happy hour by candlelight in that wretched cabin whilst I sewed and he read the Bible to me.”
― Stephen Taylor

“In his numerous historical and Scriptural works Bauer rejects all supernatural religion, and represents Christianity as a natural product of the mingling of the Stoic and Alexandrian philosophies...”
― Joseph McCabe, A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Rationalists

“During the Great Depression, the philosophy of grin-and-bear-it became a national coping mechanism.”
― Maureen Corrigan, Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books